


The Return of the Not-So-Frog Not-So-Prince

by Dustbunnygirl



Series: Tales of the Bard - Reggie's Story [6]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-09-20
Updated: 2007-09-20
Packaged: 2018-08-14 09:50:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8008798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dustbunnygirl/pseuds/Dustbunnygirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Title: The Return of the Not-So-Frog Not-So-Prince, 6 of 10<br/>Prompt: Snowfall, "the 10s" challenge.<br/>Fandom: n/a<br/>Pairing: Dahlia/Reggie<br/>Rating: PG-13, and then only for two utterances of 1 bad little word<br/>Word count: 1,865<br/>Warnings: <br/>Disclaimer: These characters are entirely owned by moi and come from my still untitled, unpublished, mostly second drafted Monster Book of the Unholy. They do not play well with others. The only person to blame for them is, unfortunately, me. However, blame legal_padawan for the fact this story was written at all, as she twisted my arm into this challenge of hers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Return of the Not-So-Frog Not-So-Prince

_‘Do you love me?’  
‘What?’  
‘Do you love me!’  
‘Reggie, I don’t think this is the time to…’  
‘As friend or pet or fashion accessory, doesn’t matter! Do you?’  
‘Sure, I…’  
‘Then just kiss me already before we’re done for!’_

 

Pain ricocheted through the back of Dahlia’s skull, white hot and endless and without a single care for the fact that she was, obviously, dead. That had been her last thought as the wolf leapt at her: that he would make a nice, crunchy lunch out of her and how she’d never seen Paris or Rome or David Copperfield and what a horrible, terrible shame it was. Given that death, traditionally, meant the absence of pain, she found it really fucking rude that her head continued to throb post mortem. 

Oh hell, she thought. Can you say fuck in heaven?

Before the thought had time to be dwelled on properly something vaguely hand-like shook her shoulder. The rough jostle stirred the pain in her head even more, until she felt her stomach lurch in response. Saint Peter’s come to shoo me out for thinking vulgar words, she thought, just before she wondered if it was possible to feel nauseous while dead and how that was fair either. 

“C’mon, Dahl,” a distant, panicked voice said, chasing away her train of thought with another vigorous shake of her shoulder. White spots danced behind her eyelids and she wondered if they were angels come to make the shaking and pain go away. “Wake up already.” It sounded like Guy - like Guy calling to her from beneath twenty feet of water.

“Can’t wake up. Dead now. Move along,” she muttered. Every word echoed loudly in her ears and shot through her head like a hot poker the second it left her mouth. Won’t do that again, she thought.

“Play dead later, brat.” A strange voice spoke then, softly accented and familiar, yet not. Its words were rough, as if its throat were lined with gravel; they should have squeaked instead. “Be a dear and open your eyes, now. You’ve had all the nap we’ve time for.”

Dahlia opened her eyes, just to see the face the voice belonged to, but all she saw was white. White light bright enough to make her flinch, to make her eyes squint to spare themselves. Bright enough to make the throb at the back of her skull pick up its beat and make her groan. For a second, she was convinced it was the white light, the bright, blinding beacon meant to lead her to her heavenly reward. Then three dark shapes moved into the light, head-like in nature, blocking the glare. Fuzzy as her eye sight was, backlit and shadowed as they were, she still recognized them, and smiled. Guy, Eva, and Jeremy took turns sighing in relief.

“Had the strangest dream,” Dahlia said, keeping her voice soft in difference to the sharp stabbing in the back of her noggin. She took in other things as her eyes adjusted – the concrete walls on either side of her, the cold cement beneath her head, the coppery smell of blood in her nostrils that she would ask about later. “And you were there, and you were there and…”

“And we missed you most of all, Scarecrow,” came the oddly familiar voice again, laced with quiet laughter and relief and hidden just behind her. A second later the voice had a head-like shape all its own that leaned into Dahlia’s field of vision. Waves of dark hair fell across its face as it hovered there, obscuring landmarks like its mouth or its nose. But its eyes – his eyes – burned through the shadows and came into clearer focus every time she blinked. Though they were wider apart, larger, far less beady and squinted than she remembered, the light behind them was exactly the same. She sat up slowly, bracing her shaky weight on her elbows, and canted her head to get a better look at the face that went with the eyes. 

“Reggie?” The question sounded absurd, even to her, as she asked it. 

The face possessed shoulders as well, which he shrugged in response. “Guilty as charged, I’m afraid,” he said with a curve of his lip. 

“Oh,” she said. “Just checking.” And then promptly fainted.

\--

Something hard and scratchy was digging into Dahlia’s back when consciousness came around again. Bark, she guessed, meaning a tree, meaning they – the not-so-anonymous but still collective they that dragged her out of her soft, cushy nap before – had propped her against something brown, tall, and leafy after her damsel in distress imitation. Hard to believe, but every single poke and scratch of it through her shirt was comforting. The pain was real. The tree was real. Both made absolute and perfect sense in a way nothing had the moment before.

Not that life needed to, in her opinion, but this one time she wished it did.

Her eyes opened easier now than they had before. Branches and leaves offered some interruption of the sun overhead. Eva, Guy, and Jeremy were deep in conversation just beyond her range of hearing, Eva gesturing wildly like an orchestra conductor on speed. Tiny white blooms fell across Dahlia’s vision from the branches above, a snowfall of tiny petals shed in favor of scrawny new leaves. Already her jeans were covered in them, faded denim buried more and more by unmelting white. She lifted a hand that felt heavy as lead and held it out, palm up, to capture the velvety flakes. If she closed her eyes and concentrated she could almost feel the chill of them against her skin before they melted into puddles and ran down her fingers in rivulets.

“Whatever you do, don’t try to catch them on your tongue. They don’t taste nearly as good as you’d think.” 

He was crouched a few feet away, rocked back on his heels and watching her. A long black coat nearly swallowed him whole, leaving only his head and feet bare and visible. His hair was brown and fell just past his shoulders; his eyes were a shade or two darker and blinked too often, as if adjusting to a new pair of eyelids. A mustache curved over his top lip then joined a goatee at his chin. The latter he appeared fond of stroking, out of idleness or deep thought she didn’t know.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” she said finally as she dumped the handful of petals and reached for the back of her head. Fingers gently prodded the epicenter of the ache still shooting through her skull and at the first promise of pressure the throb surged and the world threatened to pull itself inside out again.

“Don’t.” The man wearing Reggie’s eyes and speaking with his voice rose awkwardly from his crouch and crossed the few feet to her spot beneath the tree. He was tall – anything would be compared to the last time she’d seen him, but he most likely topped Jeremy’s 6 even feet by an inch or two now. Gentle, cautious fingers wrapped around her wrist and pulled her offending hand away. Dahlia took notice of the white cloth wound around his hand and the places where it was already red with blood. “You’ve got quite the goose-egg growing back there and I’d assume it prefers not to be jabbed at.”

“What happened? I remember the wolves coming out of nowhere, everybody running in different directions, something about a kiss…things get a little fuzzy after that.”

“Hmmm, let’s see if I can sum up.” Reggie – though she found it nearly impossible to associate the name with the full-grown human male standing over her – sat beside her and leaned back against the rough tree trunk with a contemplative sigh. “Everybody split up, of course. Easier to outrun one overgrown bloodhound than four. You, Miss No Sense of Direction Or Self-Preservation, took us straight into a dead end alley. We had to, well, improvise a bit to keep from becoming kibble. I think you smacked your head on the wall when I tried to push you out of the way.”

“By improvise, you mean…”

Reggie scratched the patch of beard on his chin and looked straight ahead, avoiding any contact with her eyes. “I mean I did the one thing I could to be the least bit helpful given the circumstances. Was either that or impending doom.”

“I think your attempt at explanation is missing a bit of the explaining.” Dahlia nudged the very human shoulder next to hers. The movement only left her a little queasy this time. “Take two.”

“It’s not as if I haven’t told you this story before.”

“What, the ‘I am King Reginald von Rapstein, an unfortunate noble stuck in the body of a ferret due to an inconvenient curse’ spiel? Dude, I was six, had just learned about the Dr. Doolittle routine, and was freaking six!”

“It’s Rupstein, for starters,” he muttered, sending a glare her direction. “You never did get that part right. And it’s hardly my fault if you were a particularly cynical kindergartner!”

“Rapstein, Rupstein…the right pronunciation wouldn’t have made it any more believable.” Dahlia rolled her eyes - which didn’t hurt - and leaned her head - which did - on the not-so-ferret king’s convenient shoulder. “Now, in thirty little words or less, tell me what happened.”

Reggie sighed and looked up at the branches overhead. They were still shedding tiny white flowers with every jostle of the breeze. “You’ve heard of frog princes, yes?” At Dahlia’s half-nod, he said, “Well, quite similar, except minus the frog part and the prince part and plus the ferret part and the king part. And with the added bonus of the kisser, being you, having to love the kissee, being me, though what kind of love was never actually specified - which was a loophole that probably saved both of us from a rather messy end.”

Silence followed, and just when anyone else would have thought Dahlia had simply fallen asleep, she giggled and said, “That was more than thirty words.”

“Numbers never were my forte, brat.” Humor danced just under Reggie’s tone as he looped a careful arm around his mistress’ shoulders and pulled her in against his side. Dahlia didn’t fight the gesture; for all the oddity of the situation, there was still a degree of comfort, of implicit trust in the presence beside her. Still Reggie, a little voice at the back of her head offered. Just taller, less furry, and – though it disturbed her to admit – cuter than she remembered.

“Neither was keeping things brief,” she said, watching the blooms fall to the ground lazier than snowflakes and only half as motivated. She knew just how those blossoms felt: wasn’t too motivated to think about moving, let alone actually do it yet. “This is going to be kind of weird, isn’t it? For awhile?”

“It might be. Of course, it could have been weirder, I suppose.”

“Oh?”

Reggie turned his head and looked straight at her, lips curled in a familiar, mischievous smile. “Oh, indeed. You could have come to before they found me clothes.”


End file.
